leftovers: how to predict when the patriot’s dynasty will end

In my Tuesday post, I mentioned how the different ways the owner, the head coach, and the best player are tied down to a helmet football team are an important factor in analyzing the state of the Patriots dynasty. When I was writing that post, I initially tried to explain the concept in more detail to hammer home the main point of all these recent posts - when an organization is in trouble, the managers leave first. However, my attempt ended up becoming the longest footnote in TOA history so I cut it out of the post to use for today. It's long, so good luck, but it's also thorough and might be interesting for anyone who understands my point yet cannot find a good way to explain it.

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First, let’s look at the owner, Kraft. He might have convictions about the team but only works with the coaches. If the organization is declining, his options are to remove himself or deal with the coaches. If he senses the coaches are causing a decline, he can make a direct move. However, if he senses the players are causing a decline, he has no direct option.

Since Kraft answers to no one, he is able to make an incorrect assessment of his own performance yet remain in his position. That is, if he wants to sell, he can, and if he doesn’t, he won’t, but decisions to sell the team are not directly connected to how he views his own performance. Further, there is no natural mechanism in place for him to sell ‘for the good of the team’. There is no performance metric to drive him out of the organization or reduce his power – thus, his power as an owner remains unrelated to his performance as an owner.

The opposite goes for the players yet this makes them strangely similar to the owner. (Let's use Brady, the best player on the team by far, as the representative for ‘the players’ in the rest of this example.) If the organization is declining, Brady’s options are to remove himself or work with the coaches. If he senses the owner is causing a decline, he has no direct option. If he senses the coaches are causing a decline, he can make an indirect move like hiring his own trainer or screaming obscenities at assistant coaches during the annual rout of the Buffalo Bills.

Brady answers to the coaches and will not survive their negative assessment of his performance. If Brady’s assessment of his own performance is incorrect (and players tend to overestimate their own performance) then it will be difficult for him to remain in his position without feeling underpaid or underappreciated. This usually will cause him to want to leave but he is constrained by the sport’s governing rules that make it difficult for him to simply go. There are reliable performance metrics Brady can use to defend himself against anyone who wishes to drive him out of the organization. Brady’s performance as a player is strongly linked to his power to act on his own assessments about the organization’s performance.

The coaches are neither opposite to nor equivalent of the owner or the players. (Let's use Belichick, the head coach, as the representative for 'the coaches' in the rest of this example.) Belichick might have convictions about the owner or the players and he is responsible for working with each party. However, as he must maintain dual relationships, his influence over one or the other is lessened because being tied too strongly to one party will threaten the other. There is only so much direct action he can take with the players if he is aware of the owner’s assessments and there is only so much direct influence he can exert over the owner if he is aware of how organizational changes will threaten the job security of the most influential players. If the organization is declining, he has the option to remove himself, work with the owner, or work with the players. If he senses the owner is causing a decline, he can propose changes to the decision making structure to increase his own influence. If he senses the players are causing a decline, he can make changes to the players using a variety of tools including the exchange of future resources for current players – these resources including draft choices, salary cap space, or the inclusion of promising young quarterbacks in trades with the San Francisco 49ers.

Belichick answers directly to the owner and must not lose his owner’s confidence that he is making decisions benefiting the long-term health of the organization. Belichick answers indirectly to the players and must not lose his players’ confidence that he is making decisions benefiting the short-term prospects for the team. If Belichick’s own assessment of his performance is incorrect, it will result in losing the confidence of either his owner or his players as it relates to his ability to balance the short-term with the long-term. If he wants to leave, he is not bound by the same restrictive rules governing the players – he is more or less free to go. He is more accountable for performance than the owner but does not control final say about his destiny (despite being the best coach of all time, at least in Belichick’s case). He is less directly affected by bad performances than a struggling player but suffers from a lack of exact performance measurement that the elite player enjoys. The head coach is the easiest to fire of the three but also has the easiest time walking out the door if he so chooses.

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All of the above (and thanks for sticking through it, if you've made it this far, reader) is an extended way of repeating a recent point - when the organization starts to decline, the departure of the head coach is always going to be the first signal of trouble. This is mostly because the head coach is by definition knee-deep in every aspect of the organization's operation yet he lacks the owner’s absolute power to make changes and cannot prove his own competence through directly measurable performance metrics in the same way as the players. This means that if the head coach goes, it usually points to one of three things:

1) The head coach isn’t any good

2) The head coach is being unfairly blamed for bad performance

3) The head coach isn’t getting enough credit for good performance

All three of those factors (though at varying degrees) are signals of bad news for the future health of an organization:

#1 is a big problem because this hints that the head coach’s tenure eroded away the foundation for the organization’s future success

#2 suggests the organization is unable to correctly evaluate its players

#3 suggests the organization is unable to correctly evaluate its coaches

If any of these three factors is present in an organization, how can an outsider confidently expect the organization to identify, develop, and retain high performers? And if it can't do those things, why would there be any high performers in the organization at the present? In short, it there won't be, which means the organization is surely headed for a period of decline.